Our current projects have two major objectives. First, we would like to understand the mechanisms used by animal viruses in taking over the protein synthesis machinery of infected cells. These studies involved two viral systems: vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) and poliovirus. These are model systems representing the rhabdoviruses, which have a negative strand RNA genome, and picornaviruses, which have a positive strand RNA genome. The second major objective is to understand the process of viral transcription of multiple mRNA species from a single, negative strand RNA genome. We would like to identify those nucleotide sequences that trigger specific events such as transcription initiation, termination, and polyadenylation.